To Be an Adorable Species: Mythos Interviews Anne Boyer

A beautiful interview with Anne Boyer is up at the womanhood-oriented, "ideologically rigorous" online magazine Mythos. Editor-in-Chief Sophia Richards conducted the interview over Skype in early March. Her questions encourage discussion around girlhood, "sexual melodrama," exhaustion and survival, reproductive labor, collective action, the alienation of technology, love, and Boyer's own life. To excerpt:

SOPHIA: Do you want to speak about the violence and unnaturalness of romantic love under capitalism?

ANNE: One of the things that happens in a world in which we are so alienated and atomized is that romantic love can seem like it might be a little communism of two.  It's feels the place where you might have this opening into the possibilities of an unalienated healing, of true feeling. But this thing that feels so good also becomes the thing that causes women to spend thirty years doing the dishes after work instead of writing a great symphony, and this thing that feels so good can also lead to the deaths of women at the hands of their partners, or a deadening of life in general.

I then want to understand how love, which is the most beautiful thing, is also the most potentially terrible thing. And one of the hopes I have about changing the world is that we must change it for the sake of love, if not for love’s rescue, maybe just for love’s arrival.  Think about all the possibilities of love that could happen if everything were organized in a way that made life more bearable, in which people have most of what we need. And think, too, of the possibilities of poetry under better conditions. I want to be able to feel the love that could finally be liberated when the world is arranged for the benefit for the world, to read its literature, to see what happens to our species when we are not in this fucked up capitalist world.

So my misamory, my hatred of romantic love, is in all honesty my complete and utter devotion to romantic love, the kind of love that will finally arrive at its real possibility. I love love the most, therefore now hold it to the highest standards. I no longer want love to be a site of violence or a site of extracted labor, and it should never make anyone ever again as sad as Mary J. Blige on the My Life album.

Photographs of Anne in Kansas City were taken by Cara Lefebvre. Read on at Mythos.